This Swiss CD player costs more than a used car. The front panel features an analog VU meter and gob-smackingly expensive controls.
Fake wood is very much in fashion these days. Several of Dell's laptops can be outfitted with woodish panels, and enterprising do-it-yourselfers have started to churn out teak laptops, oak iPods and mahogany PDAs. Wooden bicycles can't be far behind.
None of these hold a candle to the original Apple 1 computer, Wozniak and Jobs' first crack at creating a true mainstream personal computer.
This was going to be a blurb about the restoration of Casablanca, Star Wars, and the Indiana Jones films. But when I started investigating the background of John Lowry, the magician who restores these old films frame-by-frame, I discovered something far more interesting.
In the beginning, Lowry ran a little company in Toronto called Image Transform. One of his earliest successes was cleaning up the dodgy black and white images broadcast from the moon by NASA astronauts. At that point there were no digital televisions, so all manner of analog ghosting, fuzzing, and waviness crept in. By transferring the images to film through a fancy set of electronic filters, he was able to bring out detail that was previously invisible.
As far as I know, no one makes personal blimps (prove me wrong). I've been anxiously waiting for a couple of guys in Amherst to get one off the ground, but they're still sewing away on the prototype. These things have a way of becoming either a runaway success or the lead story on CNN.
In the meantime, I'll keep myself entertained with the more reasonable indoor variety. My favourite flying toys come from Canada's Draganfly, located about 1500 miles east of Vancouver. I've posted a picture of their Mach IIIz helium blimp, 'though I haven't a clue why a Canadian company is pimping the American flag. Shouldn't it be a giant grinning beaver?
Anyway. The Mach IIIz uses a three channel radio remote to control three thrusters, allowing you to avoid ceilings, walls, and the occasional shotgun blast. It's available in silver, yellow, the Goodyear logo, or the American flag. They're currently on sale for a mere $77.95. I think I'm going to email them about the grinning beaver, right now.
Mach IIIz America Airship (Draganfly Innovations Inc.)
Every evil Empress needs an army of drones to do her bidding. I learned that early in my dating career. These days, your neighborhood royalty will most likely build a mechanized force to dominate their suburban enclave. Lynxmotion offers a mind-boggling array of robot kits, parts, and software to facilitate the construction of the cyber-army of your dreams.
I was originally browsing their site in search of a cool robot arm (don't ask), but was quickly distracted by the humanoid biped you see here. Apparently, he's built from odds-and-sods available in their servo erector set. They have dozens of cool kits: bipeds, quadrapods, and hexapods. No tripods, though.
A kind warning to those of you at work: this is the type of site you could get lost in for the afternoon. There. Consider yourself suitably chastised. Surf on!
Servo Erector Set (Lynxmotion Inc.)
Satellite radio frightens me, and not just because of Howard Stern. It's their sneaky subscription model that has me quaking in my boots. Y'see, I figure that after dropping a few thousand rubles on a nifty new radio, I shouldn't have to fork out my hard-earned kopecks every month for the privilege of keeping the music coming. Of course, this argument is just a ruse to hide the cold, hard truth: I'm a cheapskate.
So, instead, I drool over "classic" tabletop radios. Some of the best come from Tivoli Audio, a company originally set up to offer products created by famed audio wizard Henry Kloss. His Model One radio is a legend -- one speaker, one huge tuning knob, one box, and one very reasonable hundred dollar price tag. By using discrete components instead of off-the-shelf integrated circuits, this radio is able to precisely tune stations that lesser radios might miss. Reviewers appear quite impressed with its sound quality, too.
If your audiophile tendencies lean toward modern conveniences like stereo, CD players, and garishly colored plastic, Tivoli can oblige you as well. Their latest twist is the Platinum Series Model One, which features several premium woods and finishes with the same great sound, priced at $199 each.
Platinum Series Model One (Tivoli Audio, LLC)
Sir Clive Sinclair is a bit of a nutter. He made millions from rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum computers in the 1980s, but his vehicle designs make me think he secretly fancies himself as Agent 007. That way, he could add rocket launchers to his futuristic eas scooters and peculiar folding bicycles.
Now that's out of the way, allow me to introduce my favorite Sinclair creation. The Cambridge Z88 is a sleek notebook computer that was introduced in 1987 and promptly forgotten. It runs on four AA batteries and features 32KB of memory (upgradable). The display is a 640 x 64 monochrome LCD capable of three (count 'em!) shades of grey. A decent productivity suite was included: word processor, spreadsheet, calculator, BASIC interpreter, and various PDA-like widgets. To round off the package, software is available to transfer files to and from a PC.
Rakewell Limited still offers the Z88 and numerous accessories online. Prices start at £80.00, so this might be a perfect solution for someone needing a cheap writing machine with a full-size keyboard. Or, if you're like me, you can use it to write incomprehensible spaghetti code in BASIC.
Cambridge Z88 (Rakewell Limited)
If I were a secret agent, I'd need something to record my "interrogations" of beautiful foreign spyettes. In keeping with my dapper image, it would have to be a Nagra SNST-R miniature reel-to-reel tape recorder. This Swiss work-of-art weighs in at a mere 21 oz and measures a svelte 5.75" x 4" x 1" -- not much larger than an iPod. It runs for a respectable 5 hours on a pair of rechargeable AA batteries, and the Nagra site recommends the SNST-R as "the ideal candidate for all portable, location or discreet recording applications."
They conveniently forget to mention that you need to be a gazillionaire to afford one; it retails for a stratospheric 9599 euros. At that price, I'd better take two.
Nagra SNST-R miniature reel-to-reel recorder (Nagra - Kudelski Group)
I like to think I'd make a great fighter pilot, although the truth is I'd
probably pee myself at the first sight of enemy aircraft. But that
doesn't stop me from wanting my very own fighter plane.
While I'm at it, I might as well want the most ridiculous fighting machine I can find. Like this Mifyter kitplane, an original design that's loosely based on a WWI Fokker biplane. It's powered by a 64 HP Rotax engine, features a leisurely top speed of 95 mph, and weighs a mere 450 lbs empty. A "standard" kit costs $14,995 but doesn't include the engine, prop, instruments, wooden instrument applique, paint, upholstered seat cushion, and static bomb and guns.
I wonder where one buys guns and bombs for WWI biplanes these days?
MIFYTER kitplane (Biplanes of Yesteryear)
I sometimes often take a wrong turn on the web and find myself browsing items I'll never be able to afford. More often than not, this involves Swiss timepieces. Since I don't have thousands to blow on a 1964 Tag Heuer Carrera automatic, I'm forced to consider more reasonable wristwatches. You know, the kind with rubber straps.
Fortunately, the First Moscow Watch Factory offers a plethora of affordable mechanical timepieces, made in Russia. They feature 17 to 31 jewel mechanisms in hefty metal cases, with steel or leather straps. The Poljot Aviator pictured here retails for $117 -- a rare bargain these days. I wonder if they use horrifically radioactive paint to make the hands glow in the dark?
The Amiga is now almost old enough to go bar-hopping. How cool is that? Commodore introduced the much lauded Amiga 1000 on July 23, 1985. I was a gawky teenager at the time, a pathetic fact that encouraged me to dream of owning one day and night. That day kinda arrived; I eventually nagged my girlfriend into buying an Amiga 500 a couple of years later. The Amiga offered a rainbow of color graphics and sampled sound in a world dominated by drab PC clones. AmigaOS featured a windowed operating system a decade before Microsoft got its act together -- like a mac built for gamers, but for far less bling. Not that anyone knew what bling was back then.
Tube amplifiers are shrouded in high-end mystique, probably because hi-fi manufacturers like to keep it that way. Maybe this will change, thanks to an influx of affordable and (apparently) well built tube amps from the Far East. The $450 SE-9 integrated amplifier caught my eye immediately. It's from the nOrh Loudspeaker Company, improbably located in Bangkok, Thailand. Even at this bargain price, you get dual inputs, four "genuine" Electro Harmonix tubes, platinum coated switches, and a whole host of other things I don't really understand. Suffice it to say that it puts out an honest 9 watts per channel of smooth Class A sound. You'll need some fairly high-efficiency speakers, but this looks like the ideal box to rediscover Kind of Blue by Miles, or perhaps induce some nasty drug flashbacks courtesy of Pink Floyd. And the photos of the staff make the company out to be a suitably laid back place to work.
SE-9 Tube Amplifier (nOrh Loudspeaker Company Ltd.)
Classic Retro Thing |
